Page 304 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

806 XXXIV Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

because of the fight against narcotrafficking, the principal resource for AUC’s sustenance.
Forced by international pressures and especially by the United States, the Colombian State
began to contrast the Autodefensas (United Self-Defense Forces) since the mid Nineties,
launching a large-scale anti-drug drive. An idea of the incredible connection among narcos,
paramilitaries and the political apparatus is given by the Samper government’s decision to
promote the development of security cooperatives, Convivir (Cooperativas comunitarias de
vigilancia rural- Vigilante rural cooperatives) as tools of “civil defense”, whose activists later
joined the AUC in large numbers. President Samper would later be crushed by a scandal for
receiving money from narcos to finance his electoral campaign. in 2006 the current President
Uribe, formerly as Governor of Antioquia and one of the most active supporters of the se-
curity cooperatives Convivir , decided to make deals with paramilitaries (AUC), since then
44
backing up the process of negotiation and demobilization. In spite of the efforts and the posi-
tive results obtained, new paramilitary groups continue to control large areas of the country
together with those combatants who have never deposed their weapons .
45
After this brief exposition of facts, we will try to understand the Colombian conflict
through theoretical hints reported above. The positions of those analysts who criticize the
studies based on the clean contraposition between “old” and “new” conflicts help us to avoid
banal simplifications in understanding the conflict itself. In our opinion the Colombian case
cannot refer to such a categorization for several reasons as the long duration of the conflict,
an often underestimated aspect, the extreme rationality of the armed actors’ action and, fi-
nally, the presence not only of transformations but also of continuities in many aspects of the
conflict.
Despite the fact that since the 1980’s narcotrafficking has certainly been the main re-
source for Farc’s and paramilitary organizations’, it is unreasonable to label the conflict as
exclusively fomented by private and criminal interests. This is the point of view adopted
by the USA establishment, and consequently by the Colombian government, since the 11th
September 2001 attacks . Since then the fight against “narcoterrorism” has dropped the
46
specifically USA distinction between war on drug and war on terrorism, thus combining two
threats that have always been treated separately . the consider the Colombian case more
47
as a terroristic threat than a political fight, resulting in a simplification of the phenomenon
which, according to many analysts, would be unable to find a real solution to the conflict,

44 Romero M., 2003, p.194-6.
45 Duncan Gustavo, Los señores de la guerra. De paramilitares, mafiosos y autodefensas en Colombia, Bogotà,
editorial Planeta Colombiana, 2006.
46 Considering the particular international situation both USa and eU put these illegal groups (Farc, eln e
AUC) in the terrorist organization blacklist. See the “2001 Report Foreign Terrorist Organizations”, 5 otto-
bre 2001, published by the Office of the Director of Counterterrorism of the State Department of Washing-
ton.
47 According to Rojas D.M., USA has had a fundamental role in this change of the Colombian conflict dynamic
(see her essay “Estados Unidos y la guerra en Colombia” in Nuestra guerra sin nombre, 2006). In the second
half of the 1990s USA, in order to prevent the Colombia transformation in a “narcodemocracy”, organized
a support strategy that was later realized through the Plan Colombia. The Plan consisted in enormous finan-
cings for Colombian government in order to contrast narcotrafficking and to support social and economic
development of the country. Since 2002 G.W. Bush authorized to use those financings also to contrast the
“narcoinsurgency”.